A fan glanced up and did a double take. His eyes widened in disbelief as a tall, silver-haired man walked past.
“Shooter?!” he shouted.
“Shootahhh!” Christopher McDonald replied, reflexively throwing up his signature finger guns and breaking into a broad grin.
The exchange happened at a baseball game in Florida. And on a busy New York City sidewalk. At a pub in Ireland. An airport in Greece. A charity golf event in Minnesota. Similar encounters tend to play out multiple times a day every day that McDonald leaves his house.
To “Happy Gilmore” fans, the 70-year-old actor is Shooter McGavin: the perennially uptight, perpetually seething golfer he portrayed in the 1996 Adam Sandler comedy.
“It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” McDonald said in an interview. “The dudes love it.”
It helps that in the 29 years since “Happy Gilmore” was released, McDonald has fully embraced the persona. He’s inked golf-themed ad deals with Subway, Uber and Nike. In the PGA Tour 2K25 video game, players can choose McDonald as their avatar. On Cameo, where users currently pay around $400 for a video message from the star, McDonald doesn’t bother to list his real name: He can be found under “Shooter McGavin, Actor Happy Gilmore” in the fan favorite category.
Now, he’s officially reprised the cocksure role in “Happy Gilmore 2,” a punchy Netflix sequel that lets McDonald once again go full tilt.
“At times, you feel like Chris could have been a superstar in the ’30s and the ’40s and the ’50s. There’s something very charismatic and strong” about him onscreen, Sandler said. “In real life, Chris is just a sweet, gentle guy, but he’s got something about him that feels like he could also knock you out if he needed to.”
Playing Shooter is just one facet of McDonald’s 47-year career, which includes more than 200 stage and screen credits like a greaser in “Grease 2”; a condescending husband in “Thelma & Louise”; a corrupt host in “Quiz Show”; a sleazy, self-help guru in “Requiem for a Dream”; and, most recently, a suave casino magnate on “Hacks.”
The parts haven’t always been prominent or buzzy. Many of McDonald’s smaller roles are on short-lived sitcoms or exist in just a few minutes of movie screen time. But he’s consistently injected his characters with a quirky, irresistible spark.
In a recent video conversation, McDonald was delightfully lively. Wearing black-framed glasses and a hoodie with the PGA Players Championship logo, he pitched his voice to a nasal tone when quoting Sandler and jovially bounced between memories — from his “Green Acres”-esque upbringing (“There’s pigs here, there’s chickens there”) to his acquiescence to brief, partial nudity in “Happy Gilmore 2” (“I said, all right, let’s do this. No pants, here we go”).
“The joy that people get by yelling ‘Shooter!’ at him, they would feel that 100 times more if they actually knew Chris,” said Lucia Aniello, one of the “Hacks” showrunners. “The truth is, when you get to know him, it’s even more exciting than spotting Shooter.”
ONE OF EIGHT CHILDREN, McDonald was born in Manhasset on Long Island and spent his formative years upstate in rural Romulus, N.Y. His father was a high school principal and directed the student musicals, in which the McDonald kids (including younger brother Daniel, who later became a Tony-nominated actor) participated in assorted ways; McDonald played the trumpet.
Naturally athletic, he went to Hobart College on a football scholarship and studied medicine, with the family-sanctioned goal of eventually becoming a dentist. “I was a dutiful son,” he said.
But during a semester abroad in London, McDonald peeled away from his classmates to spend an evening at a West End theater. There, he sat rapt as Derek Jacobi led the Royal Shakespeare Company’s mounting of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“It broke my heart. I saw it three times in a row,” McDonald said. “I’m like, oh my God, this is what I want to do.”
Dentistry was quickly cast aside. After graduation, he headed to Boston, where he bluffed his way into a job as a sommelier, charmed customers as a singing waiter on Cape Cod and eventually performed in local stage productions. When one of those productions headed to Los Angeles, he packed his belongings into an old Cutlass and drove west.
The play never opened there, but McDonald found work doing TV ads and low-budget theater. Unable to afford classes with the acting coach Stella Adler, he worked as her chauffeur and bartended at her parties in exchange for lessons. When he heard you could get paid $350 to be a contestant on “The Dating Game,” he signed up for that, too.
Steadily, TV and film casting directors began to recognize McDonald’s knack for physical comedy, aided by his lanky frame and expressive features, as well as his ability to layer a hotshot’s confidence with touches of warmth and unhinged darkness.
“I have a good range. I can play all the way from goofy, musical stuff to the bad guy,” he said. “I would go out and try to see if I could play that guy and bring depth to it, to almost be a likable bad guy.”
BY THE MID-1980s, McDonald was making headlines outside of work, namely for his ill-fated relationship with the actress Geena Davis. “I thought that was going to be the love of my life,” he said.
The two had just gotten engaged when she began shooting the 1985 horror comedy “Transylvania 6-5000” with Jeff Goldblum. McDonald was in London when, he said, her “Transylvania” co-star Ed Begley Jr. let him know that Davis and Goldblum were having an affair.
“I almost threw myself in the Thames,” McDonald said. “I wasn’t really suicidal, but I looked at the Thames wondering if I could save face if I just sort of had an accident.”
In her 2022 memoir, Davis called McDonald “one of the most wonderful men I’ve ever known,” and said, “I broke his heart to be with Jeff, I’m ashamed to say. He didn’t deserve that at all.”
While McDonald met Lupe Gidley, now his wife, in 1989 when they did a play together in New Mexico, he and Davis are forever tethered onscreen in “Thelma & Louise.”
Filmed four years after they broke up, the 1991 road-trip tale starred Davis as the newly liberated Thelma opposite Susan Sarandon’s Louise, with McDonald as Thelma’s fuming, left-behind spouse, Darryl.
The director Ridley Scott had originally considered McDonald for the role of a bar patron who attempts to rape Thelma, McDonald said. But taking that part would have sent him “right into therapy,” the actor recalled. “So, I said, ‘Sir, in all honesty, I think I’d be much better as the husband.’”
After being cast as Darryl, McDonald invited Davis out to lunch where they “hugged it out,” he said. Then they posed for wedding photos that would be used as props in the film.
MCDONALD’S ENERGETIC TURN in “Thelma & Louise” kept him top of mind when the “Happy Gilmore” team began casting the low-budget Universal Pictures comedy about a hockey bro, Happy (Sandler), who upends the pro golfing world with his unconventional skills and lack of decorum.
While there are popular rumors that Kevin Costner was originally offered the role of Happy’s nemesis, Shooter, the film’s producers said that wasn’t the case. (Sandler said, “Costner is a great golfer and a great dude, and he would have been funny as hell. It would have been different.”)
Playing Shooter allowed McDonald to sling expletive-laced one-liners and revel in broad campiness, but he didn’t approach the role lightly.
“It was as if we were working on a Tennessee Williams play,” the film’s director, Dennis Dugan, said. “It’s not a comedy to him. It’s like, ‘What’s my motivation? Where am I coming from?’ He brings that all to the table. He brings truth and comedy.”
When audiences meet Shooter again in “Happy Gilmore 2,” he’s shackled to a chair in a mental hospital, where he’s spent decades plotting revenge on Happy. This time around, McDonald and the original cast members Sandler and Julie Bowen are joined by new faces, including Bad Bunny, Travis Kelce and a bevy of pro golfers.
The athlete cameos most excited McDonald, who has become a golf aficionado in real life. And the pros were just as thrilled to meet McDonald. “These superstar golfers all love Shooter,” Sandler said. “When he walked in the room, it was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s Shooter, man!’ He became everybody’s buddy.”
Even Sandler often forgoes McDonald’s actual moniker. “He’s in my phone as ‘Shooter,’” Sandler said. “I’ve always called him Shooter, and he’s nice enough to call me Adam.”
DESPITE THE SHOOTER FANFARE and critical praise for some of his other roles, McDonald didn’t garner major industry recognition until 2022, when he was nominated for a guest actor Emmy for his work as Marty Ghilain on the HBO Max series “Hacks.”
The “Hacks” producers had originally cast someone else as Marty, an ex-paramour of Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart). But after shooting began, Aniello said, they “couldn’t stop thinking” about McDonald, who had been on their initial shortlist.
“It was the universe telling us that he was actually the correct choice,” another “Hacks” showrunner, Paul W. Downs, said. Following the recast, Downs noted, McDonald’s “dynamic with Jean was such that we did end up writing him into the show more.”
On the “Hacks” set, McDonald is “a goofball,” Smart said in an email. “He’s so affable, disgustingly handsome and a really good actor. You usually don’t get all three.”
Because of the “Happy Gilmore 2” filming schedule, McDonald only appeared briefly in the most recent season of “Hacks.” When Season 5 begins production later this year, he’ll take a more prominent role again, Aniello said. If Deborah and Marty end up together by the series’s end, as many fans hope, “that would be dandy,” McDonald said. Smart agreed she’d “absolutely” like to see that endgame romance happen.
OFF SET, MCDONALD IS ENJOYING the quiet pleasures of grandfather-hood. “Look at that little stinker!” he said as he proudly held up his phone displaying a photo of his infant grandson. He and his wife spend most of their down time in picturesque Lake Arrowhead, Calif., where they raised their four children.
When McDonald ventures into L.A., it’s often to meet up with pals like Alfred Molina, Bryan Cranston and Noah Wyle for gatherings of the unofficial coterie they call “Cads,” or Character Actors Dining Society. “We sit around a big table and just laugh and tell great stories,” McDonald said. (While McDonald has previously had two D.U.I. arrests, he made a point to note that if the martinis are flowing, the Cads are “careful” and call Ubers to get home.)
As for what’s next, McDonald would “freaking love” to appear in a Wes Anderson film or reteam with Mike White, whom he worked with on the Fox sitcom “Cracking Up.” He’d also like to try his hand at directing.
“I’m still chasing it, but sometimes you’ve got to realize that there are other things in life than this business, and I don’t want to miss the other stuff,” McDonald said. “I’m a man of a certain age now.”
He paused and smiled.
“But I still have the drive.”
The post Christopher McDonald Is Shooter McGavin. And a Whole Lot More. appeared first on New York Times.
